Cinematographers
Interviews - Cinematographers
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“Film is About Making Magic with These Kind of Challenges”: DP Diego García on Wildlife
For his directorial debut, Paul Dano adapted Richard Ford’s 1990 novel, telling the story of a marriage that falls apart between Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Jeanette Brinson (Carey Milligan), as seen through the eyes of their 14-year-old son Joe Brinson (Ed Oxenbould). Serving as Dano’s DP, Diego García’s prominent recent credits include Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour and Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull. Below, García discusses their mutual influences (including Kore-eda Hirokazu and The Master) and use of Panavision spherical primo lenses. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your […]
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“I Wanted the Film to Have the Tactile Feel of the Vinyl Sound”: DP Eric Lin ON Hearts Beat Loud
Director Brett Haley arrives at Sundance for a second year with a new dramatic feature. In 2017 Haley premiered The Hero, which went on to earn more than $4 million in the U.S. box office. He returns to Park City this year with Heart Beat Loud, a music-driven drama set in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The film stars Nick Offerman as a single dad who bonds with his daughter (Kiersey Clemons) through their shared love of playing music. DP Eric Lin (I Smile Back, Equity) shot the feature. Lin spoke with Filmmaker before the film’s screenings at Sundance about filming musical performances […]
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“I Had Never Done a Movie Like this Before, But Who Really Has?” DP Juan Sebastian Baron on Search
How do you film a movie like Search? Taking place entirely on computer screens, the film follows in the footsteps of the 2014 horror film Unfriended, which similarly placed viewers in front of a computer and left them there for 90 minutes. Director Aneesh Chaganty hired his fellow USC alum Juan Sebastian Baron to shoot the project. To mimic the many video formats one encounters in modern digital life, Sebastian Baron shot the film using GoPros, iPhones, MiniDV cameras and the Canon 6D, to name a few of the cameras required to pull off this project. Search premieres in the […]
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“The Time Spent Rigging Was a Challenge”: DP Andrew Droz Palermo on Filming Hannah Fidell’s Road Movie The Long Dumb Road
How do you reinvent the look of the road movie? That was the key question for Andrew Droz Palermo while filming The Long Dumb Road, the third feature film from director Hannah Fidell. Palermo’s recent credits as DP include last year’s A Ghost Story, the 2014 horror film You’re Next and Fidell’s two previous features (A Teacher and 6 Years). Palermo spoke with Filmmaker ahead of The Long Dumb Road‘s premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Below he discusses the logistics of filming moving cars and his aim to “live up to our influences, and […] take them into a new […]
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“We Were Using Dolly, Crane and Steadicam Under Real and Artificial Rain”: DP Federico Cesca on Dead Pigs
Dead Pigs marks the feature film debut from writer/director Cathy Yan. Born in China with an MFA from NYU’s Tisch, Yan directed three shorts (According to My Mother, Down River, Last Night) prior to her first feature. She hired Federico Cesca, a fellow Tisch alum and the DP on last year’s Patti Cake$, to shoot Dead Pigs in Shanghai. Cesca spoke with Filmmaker ahead of Dead Pigs‘ premiere at Sundance about the challenges and rewards of shooting this project. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to […]
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“The Film Began As an Experimental Skate Video”: Director and DP Bing Liu on Minding the Gap
A camera assistant who has worked on The Girlfriend Experience, Sense8 and Chi-Raq, 24-year-old Bing Liu makes his debut as a feature documentary filmmaker with Minding the Gap. The film was made with the help of production partners Kartemquin Films, ITVS and POV, and it includes an executive producer credit from Steve James. Minding the Gap‘s three leads bond in part over skateboarding, and as such the film includes extensive footage of its leads on their boards. As he discusses below, Bing used a number of different methods to “shoot skateboarding in a way that I hadn’t seen before.” Minding the Gap […]
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“Everything Was Challenging Where Money Was Involved”: DP Roberto Schaefer on What They Had
Versatile cinematographer Roberto Schaefer has worked on films of all sizes: from Quantum of Solace to The Paperboy, Geostorm to Waiting for Guffman. His newest project is a low-budget indie from first-time writer/director Elizabeth Chomko. The film assembles a formidable cast – Hilary Swank, Michael Shannon, Blythe Danner and Robert Forster – to tell a family drama set in the Chicago suburbs. The film premieres with five screenings at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Schaefer speaks below about the time and money crunch inherent in making a small, character-driven drama today. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your […]
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“I Was Careful to Always Have Darkness in the Frame”: DP David Devlin on Monster
Anthony Mandler makes his directorial debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival after having spent a career directing music videos for the likes of Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Drake and many other artists. The film, Monster, is an adaptation of the hard-hitting young adult novel of the same name from Walter Dean Myers. Mandler tapped his longtime collaborator David Devlin to shoot his first feature. In addition to his music video work with Mandler, Devlin has worked as a 2nd unit cinematographer with Janusz Kaminski on 12 Steven Spielberg films. The Montana-based DP spoke with Filmmaker about using vintage anamorphic […]
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“I Wanted to Bring Them into a Confession Booth”: DPs Avner Shahaf and Alex Margineau on The Oslo Diaries
Directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan hired two cinematographers to film The Oslo Diaries, their documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations in the early 1990s. They did so for a specific reason: One cameraman (Avner Shahaf) would serve as lead DP on interviews, while the other (Alex Margineau) would shoot the film’s reenactments. The latter footage – shot in the vein of such films as No and Stories We Tell – was shot to blend seamlessly with actual archival footage from the era. Below, both cinematographers discuss their experiences on the project, which screens in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: How […]
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“He Was Loaded with Apparent Contradictions”: DP Andrij Parekh on The Catcher Was a Spy
In 2005, Filmmaker hailed Andrij Parekh as one of its 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Since then, the New York-based DP has gone on to shoot a number of major films and series: Blue Valentine, The Zookeeper’s Wife and HBO’s Show Me a Hero, to name a few. Parekh served as the DP on The Catcher Was a Spy, a period drama starring Paul Rudd as a professional baseball player (Moe Berg) who was tapped to become a spy during World War II. Ahead of the film’s premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, Parekh spoke with Filmmaker about the film’s […]
